Re: Third update of the ballot option: Call the Free Software community to develop Free AI.

Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:57:31 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello Charles,

Charles Plessy dijo [Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 07:06:08AM +0900]:
>Hi Russ,
>
>thank you for your comments.  Yes, it is exactly my intent to provide
>a "do nothing" option, which I explained in my previous emails, so you
>are totally right about the "failure to be explicit" given the feedback
>that I had.  I originally thouhgt it is better to have a ballot as lean
>as possible, but you are correct.  Here is a revised version.
>
>---- Draft ballot: Call the Free Software community to write Free AI ----
>
>We are concerned that using the General Resolution process to establish
>rules and red lines on the use of generative AI in Debian will only
>result in increasing the total number of demotivated or quitting
>developers.  We explicitely decide to not enforce new hard rules on that
>topic, and instead issue the following non-binding statement, that
>reflects our opinion that we can make a better future if we put enough
>energy in the right direction.
> (...)
>It has been said by some that this is impossible; we believe it to be wrong.
>We call to the Free Software community to write such AI models that follow our
>core values and can be integrated in our operating system to empower our users
>to uses of this technology while respecting Free Software, privacy, diversity
>and environment.
>---- End draft ballot ----

I think it's hard that many people will oppose your initiative. I mean, who
would say “lets not build an ethically sourced, resource efficient,
state-of-the-art LLM model that works better than the currently existing
proprietary options, and run it on community-hosted, not-for-profit, for
every interested user ever”? Yes, of course it is quite removed from
reality as of today, but so were a free Unix system, a pleasant and
integrated desktop environment, and many other things we now take for
granted...

But having this proposal as an option to (or as a concurrent vote to) a
Debian policy on LLM-assisted (or LLM-generated) works seems a bit
misguided. After all, “we call to the Free Software community” is not “I am
starting a project and will devote 20 hours a week towards this goal” (and
of course, I'm not expecting you to.

Would it be nice to have the perfect LLM, ethics-wise? Of course it
would. But just stating “it would be nice” is not prone to have much of an
effect.

 — Gunnar.

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 228 B)